From Sun Magazine: Nancy Dorman and Stanley Mazaroff home

When Nancy Dorman and Stanley Mazaroff first saw the old stone farmhouse in northern Baltimore County, it had holes in the walls and raccoons in the basement.

But it stood in the middleof85 acres of farmland, with cows grazing in the distance and sweeping views of rolling countryside all around. That's what convinced them to buy it as a second home.

"We always wanted a place in Maryland that reminded us of our trips to France and Italy," Mazaroff said. "This was a little bit of Italy in Baltimore County."

A former Venable law firm partner, Mazaroff works as an arbitrator and recently wrote a bookabout the early years of the Walters Art Museum. Dorman, who has worked in government and the private sector, is a member of several boards, including the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Maryland SPCA.

Maintaining a primary residence in Bolton Hill, the avid art collectors and patrons use the farm as a retreat.

The countryside in Maryland is "gorgeous," Dorman said. "We just fell in love with the place."

Twenty-one years after they bought the 1830s farmhouse, Dorman and Mazaroff have completed a glass-and-steel addition that allows them to take full advantage of the panoramic vistas that drew them tothe property in the first place.

The addition serves as a perch from which they can survey the landscape. On one end is a 17-foot-square living and dining space,enclosed on three sides by floor-to-ceiling glass walls held up by the steel. On the other is a 14-foot-squarescreened porch, also framed by steel columns. In between is a kitchen that serves these new 'rooms with a view,' and the rest of the house as well. From every inch, the owners say, they feel as if they are outdoors, even though they are inside.

"This is our favorite place" in the house, Mazaroff said of the addition, which received a 2011 Excellence in Design Award from the Baltimore chapter of the American Institute of Architects.. "It's beautiful. My favorite time of year is the spring, when everything is blooming. The fall is beautiful. In the summertime, it's pretty spectacular too."

While they enjoyed the rustic ambience of the old farmhouse and corrected many of its shortcomings over time, the owners say, they still had to live with the relatively small windows typical of rural dwellings that are two centuries old.

Mazaroff said he and Dorman wanted the project to reflect two of their loves — the landscape and architecture.

"First," he said, "we wanted to maximize the view, because the view of the countryside is so terrific."

And from a practical standpoint, he said, they wanted to replace an older family room that was unlivable for much of the year.

"It was falling apart. It was uncomfortable in the wintertime, with the breezes coming through the walls."

To design the addition, Dorman and Mazaroff hired Baltimore-based architect Charles Brickbauer, who is well known for working in a Modernist aesthetic, and interior designer Bob Berman, co-founder and partner of Johnson-Berman Architectural and Interior Design of Baltimore.

Brickbauer worked early in his career with Philip Johnson, the New York architect who made a splash in the late 1940s when he designed the "Glass House," one of America's earliest all-glass residences, for himself in New Canaan, Conn.

"We knew that Charles had worked for Philip Johnson," Mazaroff said. "We've been to see the Glass House, and we had something like that in mind. ... It's the inside-outside relationship."

Brickbauer, who worked on the farmhouse addition with Chris Daly, said he quickly concluded that the best approach would be to create a glass-and-steel addition to replace the older family room. The structure contrasts with the stone and wood sections of the farmhouse, creating a dialogue between old and new. But the relatively modest dimensions keep it from overpowering the rest of the house.

The painted steel structure is cantilevered slightly over a concrete foundation that provides storage space and lifts up the main living area so it appears to float above the sloping hillside. The screened porch sits flush with the land. Precisely laid stone walls provide an aesthetic buffer between house and hillside, while helping control soil erosion and providing a setting for gardens. At night, the two living spaces glow like beacons in the dark.

In the southwest corner of the living room is a free-standing fireplace with a rectangular enclosure made with black granite by John Gutierrez Studios of Baltimore and a metal chimney kept as slender as codes would allow so as not to obstruct views.